1. Field
The disclosure relates generally to data processing in a services oriented environment, and more specifically, to providing collaborative services through an engine and repository of agreed service definitions, end point profiles, and policies.
2. Description of the Related Art
Businesses interact with increasing numbers of related and unrelated businesses to collaborate on tasks for a customer. Running extended business to business operations creates a need for integration of an increased number of human interactions. Automation of the increased number of human interactions involves customers and third parties as well as business enterprise systems. In order for businesses and parties to interact they must collaborate, and automation of such collaboration is called collaborative services. One of the difficulties in extending automated interactions between businesses, third parties, and customers is that there is a lack of commonly shared knowledge regarding business semantics. Therefore, in order for interacting parties to properly use and understand exchanged information, human-assisted methods, such as phone calls, emails, and meetings are required, making the collaboration process inefficient and not cost effective.
Another difficulty in extending automated interactions involves integrating the plethora of communication tools available for social networking into the collaboration process in an efficient and cost effective manner. As used herein, social networking tools include such services as profiles, communities, blogs, bookmarking, and activities. A profiles service stores basic contact information, tags for expertise or interests, and can be synchronized with corporate directories or human resource applications. A community service provides online forums, discussion boards, shared bookmarks, and news feeds for users with a common area of interest. A blog service enables each person in a group to share his expertise and opinions using such tools as tag clouds, ratings of blog entries, notifications, and flagging of content. A bookmarking service enables a user to bookmark content inside or outside of a firewall and securely share those bookmarks with colleagues inside the firewall. An activities service provides a single web destination to store to-do lists, files, bookmarks, and messages for a group including RSS type feeds of updates and changes.
A suitable architecture for collaboration is the service oriented architecture (SOA). The service oriented architecture is a distributed computing system that can be expanded, is flexible, and that will work with legacy systems. In a service oriented architecture, software applications are built on basic components called services. A service is an abstract resource that represents a capability of performing tasks that form a coherent functionality from the point of view of suppliers, original equipment manufacturers, and customers. A service in a service oriented architecture has three properties. First, a contract to the service is independent of any particular platform. Second, the service can be dynamically located and invoked. Third, the service maintains its own state. A service oriented architecture supports describing and publishing the service, discovering a service, and consuming the service.
As the complexities of automated interactions between customers, businesses, and third parties increases, it is desirable to provide collaborative services in a cost efficient and effective manner. Accordingly, there is a need for a method and apparatus, which takes into account one or more of the issues discussed above as well as possibly other issues.